Maya Angelou

If we lose love and self respect for each other, this is how we finally die.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.

I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve.

My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and more intelligent than college professors.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

Most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise.

Of course, money will do after its kind, and will steadily work to unspiritualize and unchurch the people to whom it was bequeathed.

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose – some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

The best armor is to keep out of gunshot.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling. Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly.

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

I’m taking more time to listen to myself. It’s allowed me to be an aggressive bad ass, calling it as I see it

Big doors swing on little hinges.

The sky was the color of hard crimson, dripping down a canvas, the moon splashed silver across red. Her soothing balm healing my soul in swathes of calmness, I breathe in her tides and let my body be washed ashore, lying in the sands of eternity.

Concentration is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all the management of human affairs.

Manners require time, and nothing is more vulgar than haste.

The mind is never satisfied with the objects immediately before it, but is always breaking away from the present moment, and losing itself in schemes of future felicity… The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.

Don’t do or say things you would not like to see on the front page of The Washington Post.